Douglas Piccinnini, Beautiful, Safe & Free

 

There, in my mistake. I am present. The present
lifted over itself. A day like grout
in the tiles suddenly brittle suddenly breaking
down this pattern. A date you remember
smeared in the pages of a calendar.

That was pleasure once. Sure-fit, needled
existence and as the nerve brough forward
a yellow seam in the silence. Silence thrust
its burning face to the glass—
that kind of domain. (“A WESTERN SKY”)

New Jersey poet Douglas Piccinnini’s [see his '12 or 20 questions' interview here] third published book and second full-length poetry title, after Blood Oboe (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2015), is Beautiful, Safe & Free (Palm Desert CA: New Books, 2023). The poems that make up Beautiful, Safe & Free, including the sequence previously published as the chapbook A WESTERN SKY (Greying Ghost, 2022) [see my review of such here], are constructed through notational accumulation: short lines, phrases and sentences are clustered together to form shapes of meaning and purpose, composed along the frayed and dusty edges of American civilization. “day after day mine silage / stuffs the animal vassal,” he writes, as part of the poem “CASH FOR GOLD.” Piccinnini composes his poem-clusters out of scraps and fragments around placement and uncertainty, declaring where he, the narrator, is situated in this montage of contemporary America, through all its devastation, contradiction and absolute beauty. “one is a mind in refrain shelving the days,” he writes, to open the poem “FLOWER SHIELD,” “as the throat of where you’ve been speaks // as the once between of boundaries / becomes particular to retain an abandon [.]” Piccinnini’s poems appear to skim across an endless surface but instead reveal such depths as can’t be fathomed, offering echoes of Canadian poet Hugh Thomas through how the accumulation of ellipses can provide a perfect outline of an articulated absence.

INTERROBANG

as if—stuttering
a percentage of glyphs
inflates you like a flower

in a loveable number
zeroed—whole—round

fit into you in what
like a splinter

milked from division

like an anthem jerks up—
to follow you everywhere

in every mask you slip on
to make meaning